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Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Eric Zorn's blog entry on McCain's latest strategy

Politics of personal distractionRather than answer critics, Sarah Palin will try to distract you from noticing that she never answers the serious and legitimate questions..It's as if somehow the usual rules don't apply, and where other candidates have to explain themselves and their records, Gov. Palin seems to think she is above all that...from a political speech yesterdayExactly! The putatively brave moosehunter won't hold a news conference and is apparently terrified of sitting down for a live, one-on-one with the hosts of the Sunday-morning network news shows. She ignored questions from the moderator and from her opponent during the recent debate, preferring to launch her cloying, mendacious canned soliloquies and --What? Oh, sorry. I misread the quote above. The subject of the attack was actually Barack Obama, not Sarah Palin, and the speaker was John McCain, Palin's running mate (the Swamp has a full report).Salon's Glenn Greenwald has this take on McCain's speech:One of the ugliest, nastiest, most invective-filled personality attacks a major candidate has ever delivered, blatantly designed to stoke raw racial resentments and depict Obama as a Manchurian candidate funded by secret Arab Terrorist sources -- a truly unstable and hate-mongering rant ...delivered with an angry scowl to screaming, howling, booing throngs, while Cindy McCain stood behind him shaking her head in disgust at each fact she heard about the Black Terrorist daring to challenge her husband.Dana Milbank offers this report of true ugliness from a Palin rally in Clearwater yesterday:Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."... Palin, speaking to a sea of "Palin Power" and "Sarahcuda" T-shirts, tried to link Obama to the 1960s Weather Underground. ...."Kill him!" proposed one man in the audience.Take note, now of this passage from "Worth the Fighting For," by John McCain with Mark Salter (2002):I decided (in the late 1980s) that not talking to reporters or sharply denying even the appearance of a problem wasn't going to do me any good. I would henceforth accept every single request for an interview ... and answer every question as completely and straightforwardly as I could..